From the Interwebs: Fugitive Contracts, Trademarks, St. Louis Lingo

Here are a few recent pieces from the Interwebs I found interesting. You might want to take a peek, also.

Contracting on the Run. The ContractsProf Blog posted a short piece about a man who offered a couple some money to let him hide in their house while he was running from the police. They agreed, but called the police while he was sleeping. The fugitive sued the couple for breach of contract claiming damages suffered from being shot by the police. The case was dismissed.

How to Burn Out. Workawesome did a clever how-to post called 10 Ways to Become Stressed Starting a Business teaching us what we need to do if we really want to overdo it. I’m guilty of more than a few (stop exercising, steadily increase caffeine consumption, don’t sleep). It’s a reminder that running better is better than running harder.

Trademark Basics. I love simple articles that give a clear overview of a subject, tell me step-by-step how to do something I need to do, or otherwise provide useful information in an accessible format. The Small Business Trends article You’ve Started a Business: Is Your Brand Protected? is just such a piece. It contains a straightforward overview of the lay of the land and practical tips for taking care of a new company’s trademark issues.

Start-up Legal Work. Antone Johnson posted a detailed list of legal work that new companies need to attend to. He also handicaps which work is suitable for do-it-yourselfers and which work requires a call to the company’s lawyer.

Google’s Privacy Policy. As we all probably know by now, Google made some changes to its privacy policies including consolidating the privacy policies of dozens of its individual products into a single comprehensive policy. The email Google sent me explaining the changes wasn’t nearly as informative as EFF’s piece What Actually Changed in Google’s Privacy Policy, subtitled “It Shouldn’t Take a Letter from Congress for Google to Give Straight Answers About Privacy Policy Changes.” The article contains some advice on how to keep Google from combining your user data among Google’s search and other applications by maintaining separate accounts, but the more obvious solution is to simply use another service for search.

Most Valuable Follower. There’s a web application that allows you to find out who your most valuable Twitter follower is. I gave it a try, thinking that it would crunch data about which followers promote my Tweets and interact with my content so I could see who provides the most value to my Twittering efforts. Unfortunately, it only determines which of your followers has the most followers. For me that’s Hootsuite. Knowing that Hootsuite follows me isn’t the kind of revelation I was hoping for. MVF is an interesting concept, though, and I hope they get enough interest in the project to beef up the algorithm.

Sh*t St. Louisans Say. If you live in St. Louis, watching this YouTube video is well worth two minutes of your life.